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This might have been tried by others but I think I might be on to a way of finding out what can be removed from winsxs. Taking a snapshot of the COMPONENTS registry hive before and after removing packages with DISM shows the deletion of values corresponding to the winsxs components. Simply deleting these components from winsxs breaks Windows 7 installation but it might just be a question of editing the pending.xml found in the winsxs folder (i.e. removing references to removed packages). Any thoughts on if it's doable?

Thanks for the excellent batch-file Jeronimo! So much easier for me to service my WIM-files now compared to when I did it manually. One question regarding your approach to package and component removal: I've noticed that you choose not to remove some packages with DISM which component's you check for removal in Vlite. Am I correct in assuming that this is done so that Vlite can "see" these packages and remove the files associated with them? I.E. Depending on the package it's preferable to use only DISM, only Vlite and in some cases both DISM and Vlite?